BuzzFeed

May 2014 — September 2014

After graduating from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, I got a job as an editorial fellow at BuzzFeed. The highly educational fellowship taught me all about the ways of the Viral Web, and was a ton of fun to boot.

The majority of the content I made for BuzzFeed was designed to be entertaining, unique, informative, and highly sharable. Some of these posts came in the form of a classic list or quiz, others were articles about viral news stories with some reporting, and several were researched lists of trivia and facts. A collection of some of my most notable BuzzFeed work is below, but you can view everything I made for the site at my author page.

My crowning achievement as a BuzzFeed fellow was when I dressed up as Waldo (or Wally, for any non-Americans out there) and lurked in the background of glamour shots at of New York’s Fashion Week, held that year at Lincoln Center. The original post, which you can see here, didn’t have any mention of Waldo, it just had me subtly drawing closer and closer to the camera in every picture. I put up a full post explaining the stunt the next day, along with numerous Instagrams people had taken of me. Read the full piece here.

A very, very official ranking of the many horrifying ways in which Disney — which ostensibly makes movies for children — has killed off their bad guys. This post featured a custom-made GIF of every villain’s death. See the full ranking here.

As a prolific Twitter user, and constant monitor of Tweetdeck’s activity column, I noticed that ABC News’ official twitter account favorited some strange and very amusing things (they love the hate-fav). I went through and checked out what other news organizations were favoriting on Twitter, and the results were surprising, to say the least. Read the full piece here.

A viral news post about a video of a bobblehead of Breaking Bad‘s Walter White being sent up to space. I interviewed the person who shot Walter up into the Heavens, and combined the behind-the-scenes story with GIFs of the bobblehead’s rise and fall. Read the full post here.

Another viral news story, this time about the full funding of a Kickstarter campaign to throw a performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet performed by pugs. I spoke with the actor who started the Kickstarter, and talked about his plans for the show as well as the media’s reaction to the project, which he admitted started as a joke but turned into a serious goal. Read the full piece here.

A list of 44 pieces of well-researched and verified trivia about the King of the Monsters. Did you know that Godzilla’s iconic roar was created by rubbing a resin-coated glove up and down the strings of a contrabass? Read the full piece here.

A post using BuzzFeed’s at-the-time-new slider function (or “slidey thing,” as it was known) to compare the looks of 15 famous movie characters in the original films compared to their remakes. Turns out everything tends to get darker and edgier. Read the full post here.

A post listing secret sounds that made it into the final recordings of eight famous songs, include an F-bomb in the Beatle’s “Hey Jude” and Sting’s accidental butt piano playing in “Roxanne.” I provided art in addition to the research and blurbs, and BuzzFeed’s audio team provided audio clips of the secrets sounds. Read the full post here.